Irish Olympic target shooting

The DURC 10m Open was a bit of a disaster for me personally this year. The lack of training time really showed itself, with a 24-point drop from the UCD open to 531. My position drifted from what I had trained with to a much more extreme twist, which did give good upper body stability and a nice solid hold for the first two or three seconds, but my legs simply ran out of steam after the first string and it was a struggle from there on. I don’t know for sure what caused it, though I suspect the influenze a week or so ago assisted!

The competition itself did at least go reasonably smoothly, and I got to shoot a reasonably good final because so many people left and didn’t return for the final.

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So I’m guessing this is a bad head cold. Which probably means I won’t shoot this weekend for the WAIDAM open, though I’m still planning on going (and have to since I’m driving the DURC guys’n’gals there).

I know there’s a missing entry on the UCD open below, when the PC at home went, I had to replace it temporarily with my linux machine and I haven’t sorted out the drivers for the scanner yet to scan in the diary entries for that competition. It went well though, I scored a 555 (which it seems was my competition PB, which kinda shocks me – I thought it was in the ’60s, but that seems to have been a training PB). SO I met the goal I’d set myself.

So for the moment, it doesn’t look like I’ll be training or shooting for a while.
No worries, I’ve got to play with my pistol grip on my rifle because it needs to be built up under my palm as my hands are a shade too big for the grip. I’ve done this already with card and tape, but I may as well do it permanently now, using plastic wood.

And I’m going to try to get a Squad Training blog set up on durc for the Squad members and coaches for this year. All the little trivia that I can do, since I’m too under the weather to do much else.

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You know, if I were religious, I’d be worried. No sooner had we repaired the damage from the first lightning strike, but we had another one – this time not a mile from the house, but 40 metres away. Loud explosion, bright flash, interesting sight as the struck tree literally exploded, and then the realisation that the PC, the ISDN modem and the ISDN line itself were all fried, as was the TV and very nearly one of the local dogs…

Anyway, back up here on an old PC and spare modem, so I guess I’m back… though I’m seriously thinking of enclosing the entire house in a tin foil faraday cage!

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Okay, minor glitch. A lightning strike near my house has fried my phone line and my net access is shot for the time being. So no posts here for a few days.

However, on the upside, I put in a 555 at UCD’s open today, so I’m still on track. Full report later, I’ve got to scan various things in for that, and the scanner’s at home – hence a need for a net connection 🙁

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A back-dated entry, since phone lines and computers don’t react well to lightning strikes!

This turned out to be my highest competition score so far, which rather surprised me for two reasons :
1) I’ve only been back to target shooting for a short while and I haven’t even been training at all.
2) If I can get back to my competition PB this fast, I’m not as good as I thought I was!

Next up is the DURC Air Rifle Open on the 20th, 22nd and 23rd. Hopefully I can break 555 there. But PhD work is preventing me from training at the moment, so it’s iffy.

There were specific problems. I need to work on both my shot plan, which I found hard to stick to – elbow placement problems and position assumption problems kept cropping up – and with my match plan, which was essentially nonexistant. I nearly ran out of time – the final shot came with 15 seconds to spare. I’ve had this problem before, and I need to work on shot rythym to correct it. I was happy with aiming and follow-through, for the most part. Mental focus was better than I had expected it to be, but that might just have been because the match was so poorly attended.

Horizontal hold went to pieces on series 3. I broke position and took a sit-down during that series, on shot 23. But that wouldn’t account for the enormity of the hold problem. Obviously, this means further work is needed there. Perhaps some SCATT training would help.

And series 5 was exceptionally annoying – for some reason I had a neat group in the same spot off to the right in the 8 ring. I think it may have had something to do with the blinder I was using – I’d just stuck a shot card in my headband to block the eye and the hole from the shot was letting in light. But I don’t know if that was the real cause. I need to do more training in shooting trousers, that’s the main outcome I think.

This drops me from Class A to Class B for the next two shoots, unfortunately, but that can’t be helped.

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Well the open’s tomorrow. Training has not gone the way I wanted it to, I’ve spent the week at home working on the thesis and training has consisted of standing in position for muscle work and focussing on trigger control.

However, I’ve also gotten the schiessportschule dialoges finally, and they have some exceptionally useful pieces of information. It’ll take a while to fully assimilate it all though. So for tomorrow, it’s just focussing on the basics.

The plan is to be at the range for 0800, packed and gone by 0830 and at WTSC by 1000 for the 1100 detail.

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The first Wilkinstown Air Rifle Open of the year has been moved back by a week to next weekend. This is the first on my list of competitions to attend this year, and I’m hoping to break 540 at it, which would be a decent score after a year out from the game.

I’ll be driving for DURC, obviously, so it’s a bit of a long haul, but them’s the breaks. Must remember to watch eating on the day and not forget to do so. The plan is to get there with time to spare for the first detail, get the others who are shooting on the first detail set up and then to take that time to rest, eat and relax before shooting on the second detail.

I am worried that losing the last week from training is going to affect my chances though. Going to have to train this weekend for certain, and try to get at least an hour in every day next week except perhaps for Saturday. I don’t think DURC is going on the Saturday, so that’s the rest and relax day prior to the competition.